By now I had one foot in the big-time.
Jack Parnell’s first trumpet player, Jimmy Watson, had suffered a nervous
breakdown, and was now in a Kingston rest home. Derek Humble had recommended
me and so I left the Squadronaires at once to join the band.

Jimmy Watson had been an exceptional
player, and some of the trumpet parts he’d written for himself in this
band had been unplayable for some of the guys who deputised for him.
You probably had to be a little crazy to even attempt them. (See
examples)

As far as I was concerned they were
easier than the stuff I used to practice from the Dizzy Gillespie book
of solos, so I had no trouble playing them.

When they let Jim out of the rest
home from time to time we used to perform these things together in unison,
something which caused him to flip out dangerously one night in Southsea.
He got so excited at what we were doing together that he had a really
frightening bout of uncontrollable hysteria, right there on stage, and
I had to clobber him to straighten him out.

Jim’s main problems were paranoia
and acute claustrophobia. When we played anywhere on the road I had
to sit in his room with him afterwards until he fell asleep. He was
afraid of being in a room alone. Poor Jim—he ended up as an outdoor
car park attendant in Kingston somewhere. Plenty of open spaces there.

Jack Parnell was tall, slender,
dark-haired and good-looking. He was a nephew of the theatre impresario
Val Parnell. Jack had been Ted Heath’s drummer at a time when Ted Heath
was the Number One super-duper big band, which gave Jack one hell of
a step up in the pecking order among other musicians. I personally was
in awe of the man, just as I was in awe of most of the people in the
Heath and Geraldo bands.

Ronnie Scott was starring with the
Heath band at the time, a job carrying an enormous amount of prestige,
and when he came along to one of our rehearsals to speak to Jack for
just a moment it caused a sensation.

‘Look at that,’ said the baritone
player, Kenny Graham, to me, ‘How big time can you get? Ronnie Scott
coming along to say hello! Big stuff, eh?’

Kenny himself was deep into African
folklore. It was clear that, together with many of his contemporaries,
Kenny identified being black as the last word in hip. When in his cups
he lapsed into a sort of pseudo-Bantu guttural dialect. ‘WHAT YOU MEAN,
MON? I DOAN WANNNA KNOW, MON! YOU JUST DOAN GIMME NO TROUBLE MON!’

He was also very uptight on his
own views of jazz, so that no one ventured to ever cross him or his
convictions. At the Kursal in Southend one night he got into a long
complicated discussion with some guy he’d never met before on the qualities
and talents of the American jazz pianist Joe Bushkin, whom Kenny didn’t
rate at all. The guy waxed enthusiastic over Joe, and nothing Kenny
could say would alter his opinion, so in the end he told the guy to
get lost.

After the dance we were entertained
by the sight of our coach driver, Bert Harris, who was having a great
time trying to back the band bus out of the loading bay without demolishing
all the cars carelessly parked behind him. About a hundred people stood
around watching, while one man very importantly bustled around at the
rear of the bus shouting instructions.

Finally Bert got out, very red-faced
and shouted at the man, ‘Twenty-five f______ years I’ve been driving
this f______ bus, and I don’t need you to tell me how to drive it f______
backwards.’ For that he got a sustained round of applause from the onlookers.

As we boarded the bus the man who
had been bugging Kenny Graham suddenly appeared by his window and shouted,
‘Joe Bushkin! Joe Bushkin!’ At once Kenny dashed out in a rage and chased
after him. They disappeared into the Kursal grounds and we had to hang
around waiting for Kenny. He returned, breathless and red with anger.
When he sat down he kept muttering, ‘Him and his Joe Bushkin. I’ll kill
the idiot.’

Later in life Ted Heath hit on the
idea of having three or four arrangements written of some hit pop tune,
the idea being that he would buy the one that pleased him the most.
Kenny was one of the arrangers involved, but Ted didn’t like his score.
He was then able to go around saying that he was one of the lucky ones
who had lost the great Ted Heath Arranging Competition. I thought Kenny
was a very talented musician, and he also wrote some brilliant articles
for the Crescendo magazine. He ran an Afro-Cuban group for a while,
then, for no apparent reason, ended his career quite abruptly and became
the caretaker to a block of London flats.

Jimmy Watson and Jimmy Deuchar had
written the bulk of the library for Jack’s small band, and most of their
arrangements featured some really staggering unison work for the trumpets.
Jim Deuchar had a dazzling technique on such things and used to pull
Jo Hunter and me along with him on some of the stuff that was almost
physically impossible to play. His score of The Champ was one of the
high spots of the night, containing a tremendous drum duet between Jack
and Phil Seamen that always brought the house down.

The Champ was also Ted Heath’s show-stopper.
It was an entirely different arrangement, of course, but, when we played
a Jazz Jamboree at the Royal Albert Hall the trouble started. There
were about five or six bands in the programme, and Ted’s band, accepted
as being the best by popular acclaim, naturally went on last. Jack’s
band went on just before Ted, we being number two in the pecking order.

Because of his popularity, Ted Heath
was able to dictate terms with quite a lot of muscle. On this occasion
he stipulated that only his band should play The Champ, otherwise he
would not appear in the jamboree. This didn’t please Jack one little
bit, and he argued about it bitterly with Ted, and with the Jamboree
promoters. Ted was adamant—no Champ.

We did the mass rehearsal, and played
some other tune as a finale, probably Catherine Wheel, which was one
of Jimmy Watson’s most sensational arrangements.

On the concert, just before our
last number, Jack went down to the microphone to make an announcement.
I turned my head and saw Ted standing only a few feet behind me, trying
to see the name on the next piece of music on my stand. He was out of
luck, because I very rarely got out any of the music, having memorized
it all long before. All he could see was the top number in my book,
which probably looked innocent enough.

‘Normally, at this stage of our
performance,’ said Jack into the microphone, ‘We would have played the
number you have probably all been waiting for. I’m referring, of course,
to The Champ.’

There was a stir in the audience,
turning to excited, spontaneous applause. He waited until the noise
had died down.

‘Unfortunately, we have been ordered
not to play this, as the Ted Heath band claims exclusive rights to the
number.’

Uproar! Cries of ‘shame!’

Speaking over the angry commotion,
he continued calmly, ‘So we are going to play another piece instead,
and we hope you like it. Here it is—The Joke.’

He sat down at the drums, gave us
the beat, and we tore right into the introduction of The Champ.

Ted didn’t get it for a moment.
He probably hadn’t listened to our record properly, but it started off
with one of those thrilling trumpet unisons of ours at an truly incredible
pace. By the time we’d sat down again I was able to steal a look at
his face, and he’d got it by then, all right. There was very little
he could do about it now, though—he could hardly refuse to let his band
appear at this late stage of events.

We tore the hell out of the number,
with extended drum solos, great solos from Jimmy Deuchar and Joe Temperley,
the whole works. Jack had brought a huge military band bass drum on
stage and he walloped that every now and again. The delighted audience
saw through the gag at once, and went haywire after we finished. When
I found the time to turn around again Ted had gone.

His band came on a few minutes after
we had ended. Of course, his was the slickest presentation of all. The
band was immensely popular, and, with Dickie Valentine and Lita Rosa
coming on in a blaze of glory at the end it was wonderful show business,
but it wasn’t a jazz band like Jack’s, and that stood out a mile. He
played The Champ, too, but after our version it came as a bit of an
anticlimax. Of course, he was furious afterwards, which didn’t make
a whole lot of difference to anyone.

A side effect to the occasion was
that he phoned me a few weeks later, and invited me to a band party
at his house in Wimbledon. Until I stepped through his front door and
shook hands with him I had never met or spoken to Ted before. Maybe
he’d taken a liking to the back of my head. Later on he booked me on
various sessions, and jingles, until it was obvious that Bobby Pratt
was no longer able to continue playing with him, and then I joined the
band properly.

Shortly after the Albert Hall incident
I left Jack to join the new Ambrose big band (see Ambrose). This didn't
last long and when Jack reformed, this time with a big band with eight
brass, he asked me to come back again.

Jack Parnell’s new band had a lot
of fresh faces. Johnny Edwards and Bobby Lamb were there on trombones,
and I had my old pals Terry Lewis and Jo Hunter in the trumpet section.
Bobby Lamb had just returned from the States, where he had toured around
for a while with the Woody Herman band, sitting beside the great Bill
Harris.

Jo was the son of the film actor
Ian Hunter. He had been kicked around in Hollywood and West Point during
his youth, and was a very quiet man indeed, hardly ever speaking at
all. He was a brilliant jazz trumpet player though. He told me once
of an incident that had happened just before he joined the Parnell band.

The clarinetist Frank Weir had been
holding auditions for a trumpet player. Frank’s was a small band, so
he only needed one jazz trumpet. Jo went in to the audition and waited
while two or three other guys played. When it came to his turn Jo lost
his nerve and left. He told me the names of the other candidates. I
knew them all, and he was much, much better than all of them.

Jack played drums the way you’d
expect he would after taking one look at him — elegantly. He was a very
talented musician, and a really sensational soloist. Jack always employed
other great drummers in his band. Phil Seamen was the first; when he
left Allan Ganley came on the band, and then Kenny Clare. In the drum
duets they played, always a big hit with the crowd, each outdid the
other. It was marvellous show-business. In the Jazz Wagon show Jack
had an enormous rostrum built for the two drum sets, which moved them
slowly down towards the footlights for their big finale.

In that same show was an elderly
black American named Taps Miller. When I first saw him I thought yeah,
wow, Taps Miller—we all knew the name, but nobody associated this guy
with the man we’d all heard about. But this jaded old trouper, doing
his little tap-dance, playing trumpet, and singing a piece of nonsense
called Steak and Potatoes, was the original dancer who’d worked with
Count Basie around 1944, and Count had even written and recorded a number
in his honour, called Taps Miller.

I asked him why he didn’t include
the number in his show, anything would have been better than the stuff
he was using, and we would have loved to have played the Basie arrangement,
but he clammed up on that, so maybe he had some unhappy memories on
it he wasn’t about to share with us.

With all of his considerable talents
Jack was by no means immune from making the odd mistake from time to
time. In his feature Dragnet, after a long and complicated workout on
the drums which brought the audience to its feet in a standing ovation,
he once emerged from the solo a beat in front of everybody else. Now,
this didn’t matter one little bit, because we only had to start playing
when he brought us in again, and no one would have been any the wiser.

At any rate, the whole band came
in spare. He then made the mistake of accusing us of not feeling the
beat. To a jazz musician this was, of course, a deadly insult, and it
caused everyone in the line-up to count religiously right through the
drum solo the next time he played it, and to start playing exactly on
the downbeat after he had finished.

‘WRONG!’ he screamed.

‘RIGHT!’ we roared back, whereupon
he hurled his sticks down and stalked back out to the front of the band.
Once there he glared at me, and drew a big square in the air with his
forefingers, as if I were the ringleader, and to blame for everything.

I muttered something appropriate..

When he was upset, Jack used to
put on what we called his Tight Face. This was his very own version
of the bandleader Benny Goodman's infamous Death Look. He wore his Tight
Face now as he walked over to where I was sitting in the trumpet section.

‘What did you call me?’ he gritted.

With us in the trumpets at the time
was Alan Franks, who had, for some reason, decided to champion me several
years back when I began working in the session world. He now leaned
over towards Jack and told him what I'd said, adding, ‘I must say that
I agree with him.’

Jack was stunned for a moment, then
said, ‘Oh,’ and walked back out front.

Alan was, by then, a greatly respected
member of the trumpet community. He had already worked with the Geraldo
and Heath bands, and was now in the fabulous Sinfonia of London, which
was a co-operative orchestra composed of very many of the most versatile
of the London classical musicians.

Alan and I had done many things
together, including one epic trip to a horse race at Aintree, where
he said he knew a trainer called Bert Backem. I should have been warned
by that name, but Bob Adams and I went with him from Blackpool, where
we were working at the time. This was only a couple of weeks after we’d
visited the same place for the British Formula One Grand Prix, to see
Fangio drive the new BRM..

As soon as we arrived Alan disappeared,
saying that he was going to get all the hot tips of the meeting from
his friend Bert. When he came back clutching the list we backed every
one of them heavily, and they all lost. Right at the end I laid my last
couple of pounds on a horse running at Worcester. There were bets on
two runners only, one at 40 to 1 and the other at 1 to 40. On Alan’s
advice I bet on the outsider, and lost again.

I think Parnell was a bit piqued
because I didn’t play jazz. Every now and again he’d say to me, ‘Why
don’t you play some jazz in the band?’ My reply was that I had enough
to do playing lead, and there were always two or three excellent jazz
players in the section. Usually Hank Shaw, Jo Hunter or Ronnie Hughes
were there, and I wasn’t going to compete against them.

I did it once, though, on a Sunday
concert in Sheffield. We had an arrangement of Jeepers Creepers, which
I believe had been written for us by Manny Albam. There was a whole
chorus for trumpet in the middle. Just before we arrived at it Hank
nudged me and said, ‘You play it.’

I strode down to the mike and let
‘em have it, full blast, a screech-up fireworks display from beginning
to end. I shoved all my Dizzy Gillespie tricks in there, showing a reckless
disregard for the harmonic sequence, and I did that for the entire thirty-two
bars. When the solo ended the whole place went wild. I walked back to
my seat to thunderous applause. As I passed Jack he was wearing his
Tight Face.

‘Don’t you ever do that again,’
he gritted.

Now and again he got me to write
an arrangement, and we recorded some of them, the best of the lot being
the highly successful Sky Blue Shirt, for which I never received a penny
in royalties. In view of the miserable performance of both the Performing
Rights Society and the Musicians' Union at the time I doubt whether
Jack received anything either.

Phil Seamen was on drums in the
Parnell band when I joined, with Jimmy Deuchar, Derek Humble, Ken Wray,
and Kenny Graham also in the line-up. Sammy Stokes, who had been with
me in the Tommy Sampson band, was on bass. I’d only been with Jack's
band for a couple of weeks when Sammy came up and told me that a lot
of the guys were leaving in protest. Jack had wanted to get my old girl-friend
Marion Davis in as vocalist, but she would only come if her husband,
the tenor player Ronnie Keene, came with her. That meant Jack getting
rid of Pete King, whom everybody loved. Jim Godbolt recalls

Ronnie didn't quite click with the
guys in the band, and I don’t think that anyone really liked him. Bob
Burns hated him at once, and, as far as I know, never spoke to him all
the time he was in the sax section. I don’t know why Marion married
him at all. They seemed to be worlds apart. Before I met her she’d been
going around with the drummer Tommy Maxwell, who was a great guy. Knowing
her as I did, I couldn’t imagine her being happy with a man like Ronnie,
but it seemed to take her several years to find this out for herself.
Later on she married my old pal, the bass trombonist Ken Goldie.

Unfortunately, for Marion, the first
night she sang with the Parnell band was also Pete King’s last. He spent
the bus journey back from the gig sitting beside her, telling her what
a drag she was, and what an even bigger drag her husband was. Ronnie
hadn’t joined yet, of course. Marion sat right through the trip looking
out of the window with two big red spots in her cheeks. To my everlasting
shame I didn’t try and rescue her.

Pete went on after leaving to become
Ronnie Scott’s manager, successfully running his Soho club to this day.
Most of the rest of the band left at once. They excused me from the
deal as I was a new member. Jimmy Deuchar, Derek and Ken went straight
over to Cologne to work with the Kurt Edelhagen band. I was suddenly
surrounded by new players.

Now I met, for
the first time, the Canadian lead alto player Bob Burns, trombonist
Laddy Busby and the pianist Max Harris. These three men, through their
own experience, reshaped my playing considerably. I was helped and encouraged
by them immensely, although I’m sure I didn’t deserve their attention.

They heaped praise upon my playing
at all times, and I drank it all in gratefully. One day Laddy said to
me, ‘Hey! You can compliment me on my playing, too, if you feel like
it. A bit of praise now and then goes down very well.’

I was amazed to hear this. Laddy
was well established as one of the leading players of the day. I began
at once to heap compliments on his head at all times, until he told
me rather gruffly to lay off.

The only people I’ve met who don’t
give praise to their colleagues are the Germans. I quickly learned not
to do this in Berlin, when I complimented a classical French Horn player
on his performance. He turned to me, red with embarrassment, and muttered,
‘We don’t do things like that here.’

The new Parnell band was different,
but Allan Ganley was on drums, and he could easily hold his own with
Jack on their famous drum duets. I tagged on to the Burns, Harris, Busby
group. We played, drank, and drove everywhere as a team.

Bob Burns was a large, slow, cumbersome
man, with a bright red face, probably brought on by his heavy drinking.
He was a brilliant saxophone player, often bitingly sarcastic over the
performance of others. In the Wood Green television studio, where we
later took over as the resident ATV orchestra, he once raised his voice
to soundly curse out the equally talented members of his sax section
loud and long for some misdemeanour. There was an embarrassed silence,
then the second alto player, Dougie Robinson, who was probably an even
better lead player than Bob, said. ‘Oh, give us another chance, Bob.’

Laddy was the son of the celebrated
conductor Robert Busby. He was slight and wiry, the perfect foil for
Bob. Max Harris was a solid man, favouring dark business suits, and
looked more like a successful accountant than a pianist. Max had a grave
face, heavy jowls, and an almost imperceptible twinkle in his eye. He
had a deep slow infectious laugh, rather like a gruff department store
Father Christmas, HUF! HUF! HUF!

On one long night drive up to Glasgow,
in two cars, the four of us stopped in a lonely country lane. Tall trees
lined the road, whistling and bending in the wind. In the light of the
full moon it was a ghostly atmosphere, pretty scary if I'd been on my
own.

We got out our instruments and had
a jam session in that spooky place. We'd all had a few beers, of course,
or we wouldn't have done anything like that. But we felt like it and
we did it. Luckily no one heard us.

So there were Bob, Laddy and me,
blowing away. Max, who had nothing to do, beat time with us by hitting
the roof of his car with the flat of his hand. This went on for about
half an hour.

The next evening, just before we
started to play in Green's Playhouse, Max came up to me.

'Here, did we do anything particularly
weird last night?'

I assured him that we had not.

'Well, it's a funny thing, but when
I awoke this morning my hand was all swollen up. Look at it.'

It was Max who taught me to drive.
Normally, on the long night drives back to London Max would carry on
as long as possible, then park at the roadside for a sleep. He did so
fitfully, and every time another car passed us by he awoke with a start,
gripped the wheel in panic, and shouted, ‘What was that?’

On a trip back from Glasgow he was
utterly exhausted, and asked me to take over. I had never driven a car
before. He instructed me in the intricacies of clutch and gear lever,
climbed into the back seat and fell asleep once the car was rolling.
His last words were, ‘Don’t blow the horn.’

‘Why not?’ There was no reply, he
was already well away, curled up with a blissful smile on his face.

It was a beautiful Sunday summer
morning, about six o’clock, and no traffic whatsoever. We were on the
main road somewhere in the middle of Leicestershire. I began to enjoy
myself, driving carefully. There were hundreds of birds on the road,
pecking at insects. They scattered in clouds as I drove through them,
obediently refraining from tooting the horn as a warning.

I pulled up in a lay-by for a moment.
Max snored peacefully in the back. I opened the boot and removed the
last bottle of beer from the crate in there. I looked in vain for an
opener. Then I remembered—Max carried it on his key chain, the one in
his pocket with his house keys. I positioned the bottle in the approved
way on the back bumper and hit the cap. It came off with a whoosh, and
I was immediately drenched from head to foot in best bitter. There wasn’t
even a drop left in the bottle for me to drink. I climbed back in, soaking
wet, and managed to get the car going again.

We came to a small village, and
there was a red traffic light. A policeman was standing by the lights.
I stopped the car and we looked at one another. I smiled the innocent
smile of a driver with long experience and no criminal record. He approached
the car, and stuck his head in the window.

‘Can you give me a lift to the next
village?’

‘Of course.’

He took off his helmet and climbed
in. Miraculously, I managed to move off without projecting him through
the windscreen. He sniffed.

‘Bit of a pong.’

‘It’s beer.’ I laughed lightly and
explained the circumstances. He lowered his window and didn’t join in
my amusement. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ jerking his thumb over at
Max.

I dropped my voice to a murmur.
‘Don’t you recognise him? That’s Sir Max Harris, the famous concert
pianist. We’re on the way back from a recital in Glasgow. He’s exhausted.’

‘Oh,’ whispered the policeman, and
nodded.

The birds were all over the road
now, thicker than ever, and in my relief I blew the horn without thinking.
Max awoke at once.

‘I told you not to blow the horn,’
he snapped, crossly. Then he saw the policeman.

‘Oh my God! What have you done?’
He struggled to an upright position.

“I’m giving the officer a lift,
sir.’

‘What? Oh—er—of course.’

I dropped our guest at the police
station in the next village. He got out, put his helmet back on and
saluted. Max nodded back regally. As we drove off I explained what had
happened. He settled back down again. Every now and then I heard him
go HUF! HUF! HUF! in his sleep.

Driving alone in the country one
day Max hit a farm tractor that emerged from a concealed opening right
in front of him. His car went totally out of control when he braked.
Max came out of it white-faced and shaken, but the car was a write-off.

After that Allan Ganley came around
in his station wagon and gave me driving lessons until I passed the
test.

Tubby Hayes came on the band for
a while, and the singer Annie Ross. Annie was a wonderful singer, and
she very quickly left for America, where she helped form the Lambert-Hendricks-Ross
trio.

Henry Shaw joined the trumpet section.
Hank was a very interesting character, who seemed to be capable of believing
just about everything anyone told him. He had thus been talked into
several things, including Yoga and vegetarianism.

Watching Terry Lewis and me playing
snooker one evening he challenged us to a game, saying that he would
win because he had a new, infallible system. He then disappeared into
the bathroom. When he didn’t return after some minutes Mac Minshull
took a look through the keyhole. He returned to report that Hank was
standing on his head.

When Hank reappeared everyone in
the room beat him soundly at the game. At his discomfiture we said better
luck next time, and advised him to go stand on his head some more.

His vegetarian fixation only lasted
for a short time, but it nearly finished him off. During a tour of Eire
he only ate frugal salads, while the rest of us, used to the miserable
food rationing still in force in England, went to town on the steaks.

He just folded over and collapsed
during a number one evening, and was rushed to hospital, where it was
pronounced that he was suffering from malnutrition. He was finally persuaded
to eat meat again, and, having done so, loved it so much that from then
on he took to carrying a few cold cuts around in his pocket, just in
case he felt peckish.

This also took the rest of his family
off the hook, and they returned thankfully to being carnivorous. Henry
had two sons, whom he, of course, had christened Miles and Lester.

On the boat back from Ireland a
lot of the guys were drinking heavily, and seasick with it. Henry was
OK, though, and when he spotted a young Irish priest sitting in the
saloon he said he was going over to talk to him. We tried to put him
off, Henry being Jewish and all, but over he went and sat down beside
the young man. They became engaged in earnest conversation, and the
priest soon began looking confused. After about ten minutes he was in
tears. Henry was cross-examining him on the Catholic faith, and relentlessly
dissecting and shredding every bit of dogma the guy could trot out.

In the middle of all this, just
as the guy had taken about all he could handle, Joe Temperley, in the
penultimate stages of violent seasickness, staggered through the saloon
on his way to the leeward side of the ship. Spotting the pair of them
sitting there he veered in their direction. As he passed by he tapped
the young priest on the shoulder.

‘Hey! Up the Pope,’ said Joe, or
words to that effect. The priest fled.

‘What did you have to say that for?’
said Henry, indignantly. ‘It was just getting interesting.’ Joe looked
at him solemnly for a moment, then he rushed over to the leeward railing.
He discovered, alas, too late, that this side of the ship had been completely
enclosed in glass.

‘Serves you right,’ said Henry.

When the first tape recorders emerged
Tubby Hayes and I bought one between us. It was an enormously heavy
Grundig, and we lugged it around everywhere. We had some tapes of the
Kenton band made on location that Vic Lewis had given me, plus the very
first Gerry Mulligan Quartet recordings, with Chet Baker, and we played
them almost non-stop. At the time I could see no future in the medium,
as the tapes were very thin, and often broke. It was a long time before
the studios began using tape on commercial recordings.

The BBC were still using the huge
old Marconi microphones. The best of their engineers was a man named
Fred. As far as I can make out he never had a surname, just Fred. He
was a genius with the junk he had to work with. The switchboard was
primitive, even by the standards of those days, and all the rest of
the equipment was loaded with enormous valves which became red-hot at
working temperature.

Fred’s favourite studio was the
Æolian Hall in New Bond Street. This was coincidentally a nightmare
parking area for the musicians. Finally someone discovered a mews around
the back where we all gratefully left our cars. A cranky old woman who
lived there stopped all that by pouring sugar into the tanks, and knotting
up the windscreen wipers of several cars before she was apprehended.

We turned up at the Æolian one morning
at six o’clock in the bus, after having travelled back all night from
Newcastle for a live broadcast at nine a.m. The fog in London was so
thick it was impossible to see more than a few yards. As we unloaded
our gear a car drew up opposite the studio, several men leaped out,
and we witnessed a very professional smash and grab raid on a jeweller’s
shop, right under our noses. There was no way we could have stopped
them, so we just kept quiet and watched.

In the studio Fred used an endless
stack of old telephone books to raise or lower the microphones, and
fixed a bit of cardboard on the backs with elastic bands to make them
directional. Fred made the bands sound very good, and everyone was in
awe of his talents. Afterwards we would make our way to Guy de Buire’s
basement studio in Bond Street to listen to the broadcast.

If you liked a certain number Guy
would put it on an aluminium disk thinly coated with shellac, and you
could buy it from him. There were no copyright laws as yet for the medium.
The discs ran at 78 rpm and quickly wore out. Anyone complaining about
the quality of the CD or audio cassette today should think of our problems
in those days with compassion.

Jack Parnell took on a tour of South
Africa, where we’d be accompanying the singer Eve Boswell. Eve’s dad
owned a circus down there and was instrumental in arranging our tour
with Africa Theatres.

We had a couple of singers in the
band by this time. Annie Ross had left to join the revue Cranks and
went later to America to join the Lambert-Hendricks-Ross trio. Dennis
Hale was one of the new singers, together with a girl called Irene Miller.

The bass trombonist Clarry Baines
had only one leg. He was older than the rest of us, and had lost his
leg in the war. With his artificial one he could run around like everyone
else, and even play football.

Going home in the bus from a gig
at night he used to unstrap his leg and lay it up in the baggage rack.
When the bus stopped in the middle of the night at a transport cafe
one of the guys would sometimes take the leg into the cafe with him.

A few minutes later Clarry would
hop into the cafe, which would usually be jammed with truck drivers,
shouting, ‘Which one of you buggers has got my leg?’

As the hotels got more and more
expensive some of the musicians tried sleeping in the bus. It was most
uncomfortable, and got very cold, so Kevin Balenzuela, our Australian
second alto player, bought himself a sleeping bag.

We asked him to demonstrate it.
It was midday, and we were travelling up near Doncaster at the time.
He got into it and zipped it all up. When the zip was right up over
his head one of the guys put a padlock on it.

The bus stopped then, so we got
out and went into the cafe, carrying Kevin with us. We dumped him on
the floor, where he wriggled and cursed while we drank tea.

The owner came out to take a look.

‘Is he with you?’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘Why is he in that bag?’

‘Because he’s an Australian.’

‘Would he be wanting tea?’

‘Will you be wanting tea, Kevin?’

There was a certain amount of indistinct
shouting.

‘Er—better leave it. Sometimes he
gets very upset.’ He did, too.

One of Kevin’s better tricks was
to ask a hotel manager to awaken him at a certain hour. He always had
a terrible time getting up in the mornings, and usually missed breakfast
because of this. Most of the hotel managers knew him by now, and they
refused to do it. None of us would risk it either. Kevin was a killer
in the mornings.

Now and then he would manage to
convince one of the hotel staff to awaken him anyway, vowing on his
mother’s life that he would behave properly when so roused. On those
days we would sit having our breakfast, listening to the uproar upstairs
as Kevin screamed around, knocking over furniture as he tried to catch
the guy who’d woken him up. He probably held the world record for being
thrown out of hotels.

When he got mad his face would assume
a strange sunken form, like a wax effigy that had been heavily punched
in. We called this his Kicked-in Face. Any time he looked like losing
his temper people would say, ‘Look out! Kevin’s wearing his Kicked-in
Face.’

Later on Kevin rode all the way
from London to Singapore on a motor scooter, from there taking the boat
to Australia. Kevin was even crazier than Hughie Curry, our bass player,
who’d wanted to drive down to Johannesburg in a minibus.

Just before leaving for South Africa
we did a couple of TV shows, one with Mel Torme and the other starring
Billy Eckstine. Both of them played in a drum duet with Jack, and they
were great. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Eckstine, who had previously
had a band with both Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in it. Benny
Bailey, whom I met later on in Munich, had also been in the band, and
he said that Dizzy had spent most of his time down front, playing solos,
while Charlie was usually fast asleep in the lead alto chair. He invariably
had to be woken up to play.

We were playing Green’s Playhouse
in Glasgow when Wally Heider arrived to visit a friend there. Wally
had a big recording studio in Los Angeles, right above Shelly
Mann's nightclub, Shelly's Manhole. He had brought with him a load of
Bill Holman, Gerry Mulligan, Manny Albam, and Ralph Burns scores that
Stan Kenton had asked him to give to his pal Vic Lewis. He even had
all the written band parts with him, making it a tremendous load of
luggage to lug halfway around the world.

He was so pleased with what he heard
when we played that he gave all the scores to me. I got the band to
rehearse some of them without Jack knowing about it. The next night
we arranged to play one of them to surprise him, so when he called out
some tune or other we played Holman’s Kingfish instead. It’s a beautiful
composition, and we played it really well.

When he heard the first few bars
Jack rushed up and down looking at the parts on the music stands. I’ve
never seen anyone look so surprised. Then we had to play it again, and
this time he insisted on playing drums himself on it. In the end Vic
never got the scores because we kept the lot, and Jack added them to
our regular repertoire. There must have been several thousand dollars'
worth of music there.